1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a liquid crystal display cell having a pair of substrates disposed facing each other and crossed to provide pixels of a matrix arrangement, the substrate having stripe electrodes formed thereon, a method of manufacturing such a liquid crystal display cell, and a liquid crystal display apparatus. More particularly, the present invention relates to a ferromagnetic liquid crystal cell in which electrode resistance is reduced with a light-shield in the area between pixels, a method of manufacturing such a ferromagnetic liquid crystal cell, and a ferromagnetic liquid crystal display apparatus.
2. Related Background Art
The screen size of a liquid crystal display apparatus is becoming larger nowadays. As the display panel increases, there arise serious problems of heat generation caused by electrode resistance and voltage waveform delay. In order to reduce electrode resistance, the sheet resistance ps of a transparent conductive layer constituting an electrode should be reduced. A commonly used ITO has .rho.s of 10 .OMEGA./square at most. However, the narrower electrodes that will be used in for high precision display panels and color displays make reducing electrode resistance impossible. In view of this electrode resistance is expected to be reduced by forming supplemental electrodes along each transparent electrode. A substrate obtained by using this method is shown in FIG. 4.
In FIG. 4, transparent electrodes 42 such as ITO are formed on a glass substrate 41,in a stripe configuration. Narrow metal layers 43 are formed on the transparent electrode 42 in the longitudinal direction. As the metal layer 43, Al, Cr, Mo or the like is used generally. Presence of the metal layers reduces the electrode resistance by one or two magnitudes than when only ITO is used.
This method is however associated with the following disadvantages. The first disadvantage is that it requires high patterning precision because the metal film 43 should be isolated electrically from adjacent electrodes 42. For example, in FIG. 4, if the transparent electrodes 42 are 200 .mu.m thick with the space therebetween being 20 .mu.m and the metal layers 43 are 20 .mu.m thick, then in order to broaden an effective pixel area, the metal layers 43 are required to be patterned relative to the ITO electrode 42 at an alignment precision of 10 .mu.m or less, preferably 5 .mu.m. If the alignment precision is 10 .mu.m, the effective pixel width is 190 .mu.m, and if it is 5 .mu.m, the effective pixel width is 195 .mu.m. However, high precision masks and an aligner must be prepared to improve the patterning precision, resulting in high cost.
The second disadvantage is that light-shielding between pixel is incomplete. In the arrangement, shown in FIG. 4, the metal film 43 covers half or more of the area between pixels, but it cannot cover the whole area between pixels. Therefore, it is necessary to provide an additional light-shielding film. As shown in FIG. 5, a metal light-shielding pattern 51 is first formed and then an insulating transparent resin, 52 is coated thereof. Thereafter, the electrode and metal film are formed like in FIG. 4. However, this method requires increased patterning steps.